My favorite thing that I read this week might be this little piece in Smithsonian by Karen Abbott, about a woman named Betty Bigley, born in 1857, who made a living as a master scam artist. Her life of crime began at age thirteen, when she persuaded a bank to advance her funds based on a forged letter saying that she had inherited a fortune from a rich uncle. And that’s more or less what she continued doing throughout her life—swindling thousands (millions, in today’s terms) through sheer audacity and a willingness to take advantage of the lax banking practices of the time.

Last week marked the twentieth anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s suicide. There have been a number of remembrances of Cobain’s influence and Nirvana’s heyday. On Guernica, Candace Opper recently wrote about Cobain’s death as “the first major celebrity suicide since Marilyn Monroe’s death in 1962.” She writes about the fear, at the time, that there would be a rash of copycat suicides, which launched “the most public and potent dose of suicide prevention [messages] the media had ever been able to administer.”

In the New Republic, Evan Hughes profiles the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose exhaustive, six-volume autobiographical novel, “My Struggle,” has been hailed as a paradigm-shifting masterpiece. (James Wood reviewed the first volume in the magazine two years ago. ) But the book has also faced harsh criticism, particularly from his family and his ex-wife, for the intimate details he revealed. Hughes describes the mighty rush in which the book was produced and the subsequent fallout. He visits the author in the remote Swedish village where he now lives. Knausgaard is experiencing the kind of success that most authors only dream of, but when asked to reflect on his impact he says, “It fills me with sadness every time I talk about it.”